S&P 500 Management Turnover

Management turnover is a signal value investors watch closely. New leadership may provide an important shakeup to a struggling business. But frequent CEO and CFO changes can indicate governance issues or cultural instability.

Unfortunately, this information is not readily available in Bloomberg or similar tools. It requires qualitative research to identify the relevant executives and when they change. Finding this information manually for 500 companies is tedious work. Combing through 8-K filings, proxy statements, and press releases for each one would take many hours.

Instead, I used everyrow.io/rank to research every S&P 500 company and calculate a turnover rate over the past decade. It took only 11 minutes to run and cost a little over $20.

I was surprised to see that Starbucks came in near the top with 11 departures over the past decade. In contrast, there's a cluster of companies, including Nvidia and Garmin, which haven't seen any C-suite turnover over that time.

Methodology

Turnover

I defined a turnover as someone leaving a role: departure, retirement, resignation, or termination. Promotions and role changes don't count.

Roles

For consistency, I decided to focus on the most common management roles: CEO, CFO and COO. But not all companies have a COO. And for some, the COO role was created or eliminated within the past decade.

To account for this, I normalized by officer-years: the amount of time the three roles existed. If a company has CEO, CFO and COO then it received 3 × 10 = 30 officer-years. If it hasn't had a COO in the past decade, then got only 20 officer-years. If the COO role was created five years ago, it got 25 officer-years. To simplify, I rounded to the nearest 5 years.

Time window

A longer time window gives us a stronger signal. It lets us better differentiate between companies, separating the most stable ones from the least.

But a longer time window also means including older events which may be less relevant. A departure in 2017 is likely less interesting than one that happened last month.

I picked 10 years as a compromise: January 2016 through January 2026.

Sources

I focused on SEC filings as the authoritative source for turnover events, in particular forms 8-K and DEF 14A. Press releases and news articles were also fair game.

Results

Distribution

Here's a histogram showing the distribution of turnover rate across the S&P 500.

Most companies cluster around a turnover rate of 0.10 to 0.15, or roughly one departure per role per decade. The median is 0.13 departures per year. But there's a heavy tail on the right of companies with much higher turnover rates. Rates above 0.25 suggest meaningful instability, whether from strategic pivots, governance issues, or external pressures.

Highest Turnover

EQT Corporation leads with a staggering 0.50 turnovers per year, meaning each executive lasts only two years on average. The natural gas company saw 4 CEOs (David Porges twice, Steven Schlotterbeck, and Robert McNally) and 5 CFOs cycle through from 2016-2026.

Starbucks had the most departures at 11, including 5 CEOs (Howard Schultz came back twice), 3 CFOs, and 3 COOs. The coffee giant's leadership carousel has been well-documented, but seeing it quantified is striking.

Keurig Dr Pepper's high turnover stems from its 2018 merger. Larry Young and Martin Ellen departed at the merger, followed by multiple CEO transitions (Bob Gamgort to Ozan Dokmecioglu to Gamgort again to Tim Cofer) and CFO changes.

Lowest Turnover

22 companies haven't had any zero turnovers since 2016. Some of those, like GE Vernova, were recently spun off. But many have been around for some time.

Nvidia exemplifies founder-led stability: Jensen Huang has been CEO since founding the company in 1993, and CFO Colette Kress has held her role since 2013.

Amphenol tells a similar story with CEO R. Adam Norwitt (since 2009) and CFO Craig Lampo (since 2015) providing consistent leadership through the company's growth.

Patterns

• 5 of the 10 most stable companies are tech firms, including Nvidia and Take-Two. In contrast, the least stable companies tend to be consumer staples and utilities, like Tyson and EQT.
• Several high-turnover companies (Keurig Dr Pepper, Johnson Controls, Paramount) underwent mergers or acquisitions, which usually reset leadership. However, these are often one-time events and don't necessarily mean ongoing instability.
• Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the lowest-turnover companies lack a COO, like Hilton and KLA Corporation.

Of course not all departures are the same. Planned successions, where a longtime CEO retires and the CFO steps up, differ from forced departures.

Full Dataset

The complete analysis covers all S&P 500 companies, with results and explanations for each one.

How Does everyrow.io/rank Work?

everyrow.io/rank researches each row in a dataset in order to rank by whatever criteria you want. It's powered by our AI web research agents, which collect information from across the internet and interpret it transparently.

This particular task rank for 11 minutes and cost $21.32, which comes to 4.3 ¢ per row. Compiling all this information manually would have taken me many hours.

A tool like ChatGPT would be able to find this information for a few companies. But it couldn't go through the entire S&P 500. The power of everyrow.io/rank is that it breaks down the table and works on all rows in parallel, meaning it can scale to much larger datasets.

Try everyrow.io/rank yourself for free!